This invention relates to a down-line transcription system used by attorneys for reviewing real-time transcription during a proceeding such as a trial or deposition; and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for providing real-time use and manipulation of audio and video transcripts by attorneys, judges, court reporters, witnesses and clients.
As is well known, legal proceedings such as a deposition or trial involve the participation of, among others, an examining attorney who asks questions and a witness who must answer ("testify") while under oath. These answers ("testimony") are recorded by the court reporter, along with the associated questions and related conversation, using a stenographic recorder. A stenographic recorder is a machine which provides a set of keys which are stroked by the court reporter in various combinations and sequences to represent a spoken word. To provide a backup to the key-strokes, court reporters use a tape recorder to record the entire proceeding.
Newer versions of stenographic recorders have been developed and linked to computer aided transcription ("CAT") systems to help automate the manual transcription process. Instead of solely using paper tape recording methods, the stenographic recorder also electronically stores key-strokes in built-in memory or on disk. After using such a newer recorder, the court reporter returns to his office and transfers the electronically stored key-strokes to his CAT system for transcription. Although the bulk of electronically stored key-strokes may be translated automatically, the court reporter still works interactively with the CAT system to translate those key-strokes which the CAT system did not recognize.
For the transcription system mentioned above, court reporters often use the tape recorder to aid in translating untranscribed key-strokes. In a manual process, the court reporter repeatedly searches forward and backward and listens to the tape to identify the section of the tape that corresponds to the untranscribed key-stroke(s). In locating the corresponding audio, the court reporter wastes a great deal of time.
In addition to transcribing the proceeding using automatic, post-processed transcription and audio taping, a court reporter may use a video recorder to record the entire proceeding for a similar purpose. In addition to aiding transcription, video or audio recording of a proceeding provides other advantages. For example, during a trial, an attorney often admits into evidence testimony from a prior proceeding, such as a deposition. This is normally done by reading the desired portion of the written deposition transcript into the trial record. However, there are times when this process may become tiresome and cause the jury to lose interest. To keep the jury interested, an attorney may instead want to play the actual video or audio of the desired testimony.
Video or audio recordings of prior testimony also offer other benefits at trial. Unlike a written transcript, video or audio enable an attorney to convey to the jury the demeanor of the witness. For example, if a witness hesitates before answering a deposition question and is then visibly and audibly uncomfortable in answering, the jury may question the witness's credibility. It is virtually impossible to convey the same to the jury from prior written testimony.
In addition, an attorney may want to play video or audio of prior testimony by a trial witness to ask the witness to clarify the prior testimony in view of his present testimony or to impeach the witness.
Despite the desirability of video or audio recordings, their use in court proceedings has been very limited due to various problems. For example, if an attorney wants to use prior video or audio testimony at trial, he must, as part of pre-trial preparation, consult the written transcript and then manually search through any number of tapes to find the desired material. The attorney may also want to edit out any undesired material. Most attorneys, however, do not have the equipment or time (especially immediately prior to or during a trial) to perform these tasks. Consequently, an attorney often must send the tapes to an editing company, or court reporter, that specializes in video and audio editing. Besides being time consuming, this alternative process is also expensive and forces the attorney to rely on the accuracy and dependability of the editing company or court reporter. Mistakes often occur that are not discovered until trial when it is too late.
In addition, video and audio recordings present problems associated with storing, accessing, and annotating a large volume of material. An attorney at trial normally must sift through many hours of testimony including that from numerous depositions, previous trial testimony, and possibly from a preliminary injunction or other hearing. All this testimony must be stored on tapes, creating the problem of accessing desired testimony at the desired time. The trial process is often unpredictable and an attorney cannot have video or audio testimony prepared for all possible contingencies or potential uses.
Furthermore, even if an attorney could have prior testimony prepared for use at any given time during the trial, he is still unable to access previous video or audio trial testimony given the same day. Say, for example, an attorney wants to revisit testimony given a half hour earlier. To do so would require the court reporter to stop taping and manually rewind to find the desired testimony and eventually fast forward to reset the tape in order to continue the proceeding. Because it is time consuming and burdensome, this process is not practicable in a fast paced trial setting.
If, for example, an attorney does not understand an answer, the video and audio taping proceeds while the court reporter reads the answer back from the paper tape record. This requires the court reporter to stop recording, pick up the paper tape output from the stenographic recorder, search for the portion of the record at issue, and read the stenographic key strokes. This reading is often broken with misplaced delays in pronunciation between phonemes and words making it difficult to understand. Furthermore, because searching for a portion of the record in a series of printed key-strokes proves to be very difficult and time consuming, attorneys are forced to limit requests to have only the most recent Q & A's read back.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus which will provide real-time synchronization of a written transcript with audio and video.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus which will provide virtual real-time access to prior audio or video testimony.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus which will provide virtual real-time marking and annotation of audio or video.